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Fort Smith Residents Back Stronger Tree Regs

At a public meeting Thursday night, Fort Smith residents told city leaders they’d like to see stronger tree regulations.

“We’ve had a two-year drought,” said landscape architect Tim Schale. “We’ve lost some big oak trees and other native species. We’ve had ice storms. So I’m definitely in favor of some type of tree ordinance. Developers are the main people we are going to have to swing over to our side.”

Fort Smith’s Unified Development Ordinance regulates, to a degree, tree coverage in new developments.

“The UDO is new enough that it will take a while before you really see that around town,” Alsup added.

The city’s tree ordinance regulates only parks.

Thursday’s public meeting at the Creekmore Park Community Center attracted about 50 residents. The meeting was prompted by the Fort Smith Parks Commission, which also serves as the city’s tree board.

“It was a discussion within our tree board that it was a desire to make this ordinance citywide,” commission chairman Bobby Aldridge said. “We talked about whenever you go in and develop a site and remove trees, there would be a requirement to replace trees. Then we went off into a tangent about is it one tree for one tree, is it a percentage?

“It quickly became apparent we couldn’t handle this on our own.”

Schale said that looking at Fort Smith on Google Earth, “you can just go all over the city and see these bare areas.”

“It’s a tragedy,” he said.

Nine-year resident Chuck Nardi said he wants to see more green space in Fort Smith.

“I was kind of dismayed to learn the canopy coverage was only 14 percent,” he said. “Forty percent is ideal. It’s a long way from 14 to 40, but hopefully there’s some plan to get us to something reasonable.”

“I think the citizens need to be involved,” she said. “We all just need to pitch in … to make it a beautiful place to live.”

Bob Gillson, a member of Fort Smith-based Museum of the Hardwood Tree, said he also supports stronger regulations.

“Tree maintenance companies should be required to prune trees for acceptable horticultural standards instead of just going in there, cutting them up and topping the trees,” he said. “That’s going to take an ordinance to require them to do that. You can see the results right now. They are just butchering the trees.”

“When I first moved here, the first thing I noticed was you could follow the line of butchered trees,” Jo Boyd Hines said. “You knew that the utility company had been doing their work. I think it’s a shame this is allowed to happen in a city like Fort Smith.”

Terry Lovell displayed photographs of what he described as damage to his property following a recent power line upgrade.